“I’ll get to the NCIC,” Virgil said. He walked to his truck, sat in the driver’s seat, and called Davenport, told him what had happened. Davenport tracked down their researcher, who found Erikson’s driver’s license, and used the birth date to check his records with the National Crime Information Center.
Davenport came back and said, “She says he’s clean.”
“Goddamnit. This complicates things,” Virgil said. “We’ve got two TV trucks here now, and they’re going to start saying that we might have gotten the bomber. Maybe we did, but I don’t believe it yet.”
“What about your survey?” Davenport asked. “You started pushing the list yet?”
“Not yet. I’ll do that now.”
Barlow came back. “He’s not in our database.”
“Nothing with the NCIC,” Virgil said.
Neighbors were starting to gather on the lawns adjacent to Erikson’s house, and Virgil left Barlow and walked over to two women. “You guys friends with the Eriksons?”
“Is he really the bomber?” one woman asked.
“Well, a bomb went off, but we really don’t know anything yet,” Virgil said.
“Is he going to make it?” the second woman asked.
Virgil shook his head: “No.”
“Oh, God, poor Sarah,” the first woman said.
“That’s his wife?”
“Yes. No children, thank God. I can’t believe he’s the bomber.”
“Why not?” Virgil asked.
“Well, because… he’s a car salesman kind of guy, he’s always running around yelling and waving his arms, but he’s a nice man. I can’t believe he’d bomb people.”
“Not exactly a loner, like you hear about,” said the second one. “He was always talking to everybody, sort of bs-ing around the neighborhood. He’d fix lawn mowers-everybody’s lawn mowers. Bring him a broken lawn mower, he’d get it running like new.”
“Thanks.” Virgil shook his head and walked back to Barlow and the tech, who were standing behind the wrecked car, looking at the backseat. Virgil asked them, “Did you guys see any other bomb-making stuff in the garage? More pipe, switches, blasting caps…”
“Just the pipe and the blasting cap,” Barlow said.
The tech said, “But it’s the same kind of blasting cap that was stolen from the quarry.”
“Yeah? You’re sure?”
“I’m sure.”
They had a case, Virgil thought, as he watched the two ATF men prowl the perimeter of the explosion. Erikson apparently had the motive-the pollution of the trout stream-and he had the mechanical skills, judging from his garage workshop.
But it was all very pat. One bomb went off. One bomb remained in evidence, and one blasting cap. No more pipe, no more explosive, no more blasting caps. Just enough to hang him, without much diminishing the bomber’s stockpile of explosive… if the bomber was indeed somebody else.
One thing I can check, Virgil thought. He found Ahlquist and said, “Where’s the Chevy dealer?”
The Chevy dealer was five minutes away, on Highway 71: Virgil went that way, in a hurry, pulled into the lot and dumped the truck in a visitor’s space. Inside, he showed his ID to the receptionist and asked to see the manager: “Is this about Henry?” she asked.
“Yes it is.”
“Is he… all right?” She knew the answer to that: Virgil could see it in her eyes.
“No,” he said.
“Ah, jeez,” she said. “C’mon, let’s find Ron, he was calling the hospital.”
The manager saw them coming through the window in his office, hung up, looking at Virgil, said, “Are you with the police?”
“Yeah.”
“Is Henry okay?”
Virgil shook his head. “No, he’s not.”
“Ah, boy. This is fuckin’ nuts. No way-”
“I need to look at a calendar or a time card or something. I need to know if Henry was working two weeks ago Tuesday.”
“He works Tuesdays through Saturdays, off Sundays and Mondays. He hasn’t, hadn’t, taken any extra days off lately. I can look at my schedule…”
“Please look,” Virgil said.
The manager turned to a computer screen and brought up a schedule, shook his head, and said, “I show him working eleven to seven on that Tuesday.”
“And on Wednesday?”
“Same.”
The bomb at the Pinnacle had gone off at nine A.M. on Wednesday, and the ATF didn’t think it could have been planted any more than twenty-four hours earlier. If that was true, Erikson couldn’t have planted the bomb before work, because he wouldn’t have had time to get back. He could have theoretically flown to Michigan after work… but then, how’d he get a bomb on the plane? Have to be a private plane. But a private plane would be obvious, there’d be lots of records, and a smart guy wouldn’t do that.
No, it just didn’t work. He’d have the researcher check, but it didn’t work.
Erikson could, of course, have an accomplice in Grand Rapids, who planted the bomb on a Tuesday because that would give Erikson an alibi…
But Virgil didn’t like the feel of that, either.
The manager broke into his chain of thought. “Does Sarah know?”
Virgil went back to the bombed garage thinking that Erikson was more likely a victim than a bomber. If that were correct, then the obvious question was, Why?
Why Erikson, and not somebody else? There were at least two good reasons why somebody might be bombed.
First, the real bomber might be trying to hang a frame on somebody else, in preparing to end his own bombings. If he were ditching all of his Pelex, the blasting caps, the rest of the pipe, and so on, and if he did a complete and efficient cleanup of his workshop, then even if Virgil managed to identify him, a conviction would be tough: no physical evidence, plus another bomber candidate to point at.
Second, Erikson might have been killed because he knew something.
Which one?
Virgil stood outside the garage and watched the cops and the ATF people working. The ATF tech with bomb disposal experience had moved the pipe, from a distance, and nothing blew.
“How’d he do that?” Virgil asked.
“We’ve got all kinds of high-tech equipment with us, we just haven’t had to bring it out yet.”
“Like what? A robot?”
“A long string,” Barlow said. “He dropped it over the end of the pipe, then we all cleared out, and he pulled it over. So then we knew it wasn’t booby-trapped, and when we got a close look at it, we saw that it’d been packed with Pelex, but he hadn’t put in the blasting cap yet. We may be lucky: if it’s got a good fingerprint, or a little DNA in the Pelex…”
“Isn’t that a little weird, that he’d pack it without a blasting cap?” Virgil asked. “Wouldn’t you have to take the Pelex back out before you put the blasting cap in?”
“No, not necessarily… I mean, we don’t know if that’s all the Pelex he was planning to put in there,” Barlow said.
“Still seems weird to me,” Virgil said.
“We don’t know his working style yet, so we don’t know if it’s weird,” Barlow said. He sounded, Virgil thought, like a guy who really wanted Erikson to be the Man.
Virgil stood and looked at the garage for a long time, and another thought occurred: if Erikson was not the bomber, then the bomber knew how to get into his garage, in the night, and where the workbench was.
